The present invention relates in general to telephony, and more particularly to an apparatus and method for dynamically allocating telephone and other communications equipment to predetermined groups.
It is known in communications systems such as PABXs and key telephone systems to allocate persons having communications equipment, such as telephone sets, to one or more communication groups, such as hunt groups or key line groups, having a common purpose (i.e. each person of the group is equally competent to deal with an incoming call to the group). One common example within large technology companies, is the establishment of customer support groups. Hunt groups may be of a number of types, and are identified by pilot number (the number dialed to obtain the group), hunt type (terminal, circular, or longest idle member) and a list of member extension numbers.
Each time a member is added to or deleted from the group (e.g. due to a role change within the organization), the member list must be manually updated. Also, when a person who is a member of several groups leaves the organization, then each of the hunt groups to which that person belonged must be updated, resulting in considerable replication of work. Finally, in the event that a person is temporarily unable to participate in the group due to illness, travel, etc., there is no mechanism according to the prior art for temporarily removing that person from the group so as not to ring his or her telephone set.
According to the present invention, an apparatus and method are provided for assigning to each person within an organization at least one role, a plurality of communication groups having respective group name identifiers for associating predetermined roles with the groups and respective group phone numbers, and a role list data file for automatically associating respective ones of the users with a predetermined one or more of the communication groups according to the role identifier for the respective users.
According to the invention, when the role of the user changes, the user""s membership in one or more communication groups is automatically updated to take the person out of any groups that he or she is no longer a part of, or to play a unique role within each group to which the user is added.
Therefore, the system of the present invention overcomes tedious manual addition, deletion and revision to communication groups, such as hunt groups and key line groups, as exemplified by the prior art.